A number of prior art publications describe the advantages associated with the use of fabric conditioning articles during the drying-up of fabrics or textiles rather than during their washing-up. These fabric conditioners intended for use in a clothes' dryer consist generally of an absorbent carrier element or substrate bearing at least one fabric conditioning agent, the latter acting as a softener, perfuming ingredient, anti-shrinking agent, bactericide or other. Amongst these publications, one can cite U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,686,025, 3,956,556, 4,073,996, 4,237,155, 4,808,086 and 4,818,556, which are here included by reference. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,073,996, to Bedenk and Sagel, describes an article of the type above-mentioned consisting essentially of a substrate carrying a mixture of an organic softening agent with a smectite clay. Bedenk and Sagel also cite, in a detailed manner, other types of additives that can be incorporated into the said mixture, namely perfuming ingredients. However, the cited authors also remark that it is very difficult to obtain an optimum transfer of the perfuming composition carried by the substrate from the latter to the fabric treated during its drying-up, mainly as a result of the problems related to the often weak substantivity of the fabric and the high volatility of most of the perfuming ingredients preferred for this type of application. They further observe that the presence of smectite clay in the mixture which is carried by the conditioning article according to their invention makes it possible to improve said transfer of the perfuming ingredient, as compared to prior known fabric conditioning articles.
We have now discovered that the amount of perfuming composition that can be transferred from a substrate such as that described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,073,996 into a cotton fabric, when the latter is dried under the conditions described before, can be distinctly increased if a particular perfuming ingredient is used in said composition, combined with a mixture of methyl abietates.
Methyl abietates are the methyl esters of abietic acid, which are represented by the formula ##STR3## which can have one or two double bonds in the positions indicated by the dotted lines. These compounds are well known and used in the perfume industry as fixatives [see S. Arctander, Perfume and Flavor Chemicals, refs. 1570 and 1892, S. Arctander, Montclair, N.J., USA]. It could have been expected, therefore, that their combined use with a perfuming ingredient in a composition carried by a substrate, consisting of a flexible porous or fibrous element and adapted to the conditioning of fabrics during the drying-up of the latter, might have rendered the transfer of said composition between the substrate and the cotton fabric less efficient and reduced the amount of perfuming composition deposited on said cotton fabric, when compared to the transfer process of a perfuming composition free of methyl abietates. However, it is exactly the contrary that we observe, i.e., the presence of methyl abietates in the perfuming composition clearly favors the transfer of the latter.